...even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.

All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm.

So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.

I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage.

...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.

(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)

People who don't marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married.

...that's part of what marriage means: sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would.

The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.

Natural isn't the same as right. Normal isn't the same as moral. Everyone deserves a say in what happens to the world.

It was God who gave a man's rib to a woman. But it is man who must learn to give away his heart and never take it back.

She pushed my chest like she wanted me off of her, but her fingers had my shirt clutched in them and I knew she was full of shit. She wanted me.

There were a couple of occasions when it was passed around - and, unlike President Clinton, I did inhale!

All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

Is the Church fulfilling a purely religious role when by its silence or friendly relationships it lends legitimacy to dictatorial and oppressive government?

There've been times where I wondered whether it was worth continuing in my own education.

I have my own opinions, but my songs don't share them.